Toby Barlow has taken to calling a red brick home in Detroit the Blossom, though it’s hardly flowered yet.

He and Sarah Cox bought the decaying house, littered with pill bottles and garbage, in June 2012 for $1,000 in a foreclosure auction, along with the Peach, another house that went for the same price.

This was the start of the Write-A-House project.

With a home, dubbed The Apple and donated by Power House Productions, Barlow and Cox founded Write-A-House two years ago in an effort to bring journalists, poets and novelists into a small area in Detroit, dotted with abandoned homes and closed stores.

The homes are on Moran, McLean and Meade, all walking distance from each other.

The homes will each cost $25,000 to $50,000 to renovate, and will be given to three writers, free of charge. Their only cost will be property taxes and insurance, and two years that must be spent writing and blogging in the home about anything that interests them.

Then they’ll get the deed to the home.

“(Toby and I) were sitting and talking about writers residencies and through subsequent conversations, the idea evolved into giving the house away instead of making it temporary,” Cox said. “That’s what Detroit needs: permanent residents.”

After establishing the Write-A-House as a nonprofit two years ago, hiring a contractor to assess the estimated cost of restoring each house, and the decision to work with Young Detroit Builders, a nonprofit that teaches youths the construction trade, the project opened up an Indiegogo campaign on the Internet last week asking for donations toward The Peach House.

The Peach House, on McLean, will be the first home renovated, because it has the least damage, said Cox, 31.

“We need to take it slowly,” said Kat Hartman, acting director of the Write-A-House project. “These houses are so rough and they have been vacant for a while, so they need capital to get them up to code.”

When he’s not raising funds or renovating houses, Barlow, 47, is chief creative officer for the advertising agency Team Detroit, and lives in Detroit’s Lafayette Park neighborhood. He grew up in the Blue Mountain Center, an artist’s community in the Adirondack Mountains in upstate New York.

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Founder Sarah Cox is the founding editor of Curbed Detroit, a real estate and neighborhoods blogs. She freelanced in New York City, until moving to Detroit three years ago.

Artists colonies exist nationwide, such as Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, N.Y, and The MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, N.H.

But Detroit’s is unique, they say, because eventually the homes will be given to the writers.

Writers can begin to apply for the houses in the spring, and the project aims to draw local and international writers. Barlow said already they have received hundreds of e-mails “from writers locally, all the way into the Netherlands.” The creators said there are no set criteria or qualifications for writers interested in applying.

“What I’ve found is that if you have a strong enough story or strong enough idea, it promotes itself,” Barlow said “We’ve gotten feedback from a lot of authors, we knew that it made idealistic sense but we didn’t know if it made practical sense.”

The writers will be asked to participate in a blog to document their experiences in the houses.

“In the application process we’ll do as much education on where we’re going to land them as possible, and prepare them for a rougher neighborhood,” Hartman said.

Barlow, Cox and Hartman say they will be careful in interviewing applicants to eliminate concerns that the writers might be interested only in flipping the homes to sell, or have other nonliterary intentions.

“I’d love it if people embraced all things happening here,” Barlow said. “We have 40 years of resistance to erode away, but hopefully people feel more comfortable in the city they call home.”